Tag Archives: community

Over the past few months I’ve been researching a report for CIRCOM Regional, the association of regional public service broadcasters in Europe. It has just been published at CIRCOM’s Annual Conference, held this year in Croatia. The report, all 93 pages of it, examines the social media and online community activities of 39 regional stations across 31 different countries, from the perspective of the user.

It has been a fascinating piece of research to carry out and shows that stations across the continent are using social media and interacting with their audience in quite different ways. You can read the report in full on the CIRCOM Regional website. Here are a few charts that show the broad picture of regional station’s engagement with the key social platforms:

Twitter

{Above: Year regional stations joined Twitter}

Facebook

{Above: Year regional stations joined Facebook}

YouTube

{Above: Year regional stations joined YouTube}

Instagram

{Above: Year stations joined Instagram}

{Above: Type of activity from regional stations on YouTube}

Interactions and user generated content

{Above: Types of interactions}

There’s a lot in the report, it looks at trends across the region as well as briefly examining each station. It has been a most enlightening exercise for me and I believe a relevant document for anyone with an involvement, or interest, in broadcasting, regional or otherwise, in Europe right now. Full report available here.

Recently, I’ve seen some fairly savvy organisations do some not so savvy things when it comes to community so I thought I would jot down a few very simple thoughts on the topic.

Remember you are not building a community you are facilitating an existing one. If your goal is to “build/grow” community around your brand/organisation, make sure you take a person (better still more than one person) who you think is an existing member of your community and work through what they need or what facilities an online community could provide this person. Make sure there is going to be something in it for them individually as members of the community.

As a brand/organisation you are not the community. Think about it like a party, you (the brand/organisation) are akin to the room where the event is being held and the person facilitating the event. Remember this at all times.

Continuing with that analogy from point 2, as the facilitator you need to help to get conversation started (no one likes a party where the only person talking and contributing is the facilitator/host). Entertain your community (a party without some amusement would be pretty boring, why would anyone turn up?). Finally, if you think you’re going to have a fairly boisterous community, treat it like a boisterous party – lay down some rules, reward good behaviour and eject the trouble makers who are just ruining the party for everyone else.

If you have any other simple suggestions, please share in the comments below.

WorldIrish is the best organisation to create a community for Irish people and those who think Irish. It’s assembling an excellent team of people and will be working hard over the coming months to create something useful and meaningful for the global Irish community. I’m excited to be part of this.

I started in RTÉ in 2007 and had some great experiences from covering Barack Obama’s convention speech in Denver to travelling to Kenya as a backpack reporter. I found 2011 (like most people working in the media) to be an exceptionally busy year. I established RTÉ’s first social media desk, project managed RTÉ’s digital output across several platforms for the General Election and most recently worked on the organisation’s digital strategy.

I have been fortunate to work with some truly excellent people in RTÉ during an interesting time of great digital change.

I’m leaving an established mainstream media organisation for a very ambitious start up. It’s going to be a big change, but one I’m keen to embrace.

We’ll be working hard in WorldIrish over the coming months to introduce an online global Irish community with greater functionality. I’m looking forward to taking on a new set of challenges.